Don't Miss The Curtain Call
by Elodie.Haven
Summary: "Under her tutelage he will learn to create night skies full of stars and rivers that glisten silver in vintage lamplight." Character sketch of Mal, and the story of her destruction.


**Don't Miss the Curtain Call**

A Dom x Mal Inception one-shot

She falls so gracefully from the thirteenth-story windowsill, with her eyes closed and her lashes brushing against her cheekbones, her hair blowing around her face and her toes arched as delicately as a dancer's, that he truly believes for a moment out of time that she was right, and that she is merely slipping through the cracks in consciousness into a world more beautiful than anything they could ever dream up. Then the moment ends, and he screams and screams.

He does not shed a single tear, however, until he thinks, hours later and with insidious irony, that she was the one who was always grounded in reality, while he floated free.

It should have been he who died.

…

_What has been put asunder_

_Shall again be whole_

…

When he meets her, he is all raw talent and brilliant ideas—no experience, no finesse. His cities sprawl around him, namelessly gorgeous in their excessive grandeur, but the first time they descend into the dream world together she purses her lips and points out that the clouds are too uniformly shaped and the grass is an unnatural shade of green. He tears his eyes away from the splendor of his creation and realizes how far he has left to go.

He knows already that she'll be his guide, and that under her tutelage he will learn to create night skies full of stars and rivers that glisten silver in vintage lamplight.

…

_In this neon black gloom_

_I still see your face_

…

They meet in Venice.

He saunters into the back room of an abandoned church with his bag of blueprints slung over his shoulder. He's half a decade into the extraction business and has already established himself as an architect of unparalleled skill. As of that moment, he regrets ever taking the Venice job. It's boring and common and corporate and God, there are students meant for work like this. He wants to do something extraordinary.

But everything changes when he sees his mentor seated on a folding chair in a white shaft of natural light in the center of the room, pale hair glinting gold. As he ducks through the doorway Miles turns towards him, and the movement reveals the woman seated cross-legged on the floor beside him.

"Mr. Cobb, you're just in time to meet your new extractor. Mallorie, darling, this is your architect."

Her back is turned to him, and all he can see of her in that first glimpse are the slim lines of her neck and shoulders, the careless elegance pinned-up hairstyle. Then she springs to her feet with a fluidity meant for pointe shoes or runner's medals, and strides forward to meet him, hand extended and half a smirk playing at her lips.

"I have heard so much about you," she smiles. Her lilting accent belongs to another world.

For the rest of his life he will remember her like this, framed against the brightness the skylight in the domed ceiling throws across the floor. The room is dusty and slightly too warm for comfort, the floor is scuffed and there's miscellaneous debris piled in the corners, shoved aside to make room for a motely collection of desks and filing cabinets. The Italian sun turns her hair to fire, and her blue eyes, skillfully made up in an unusual shade of eyeliner that's more gold than brown, open wide despite the glare. She meets his gaze evenly, but her eyes, he will learn, never stay fixed for long, and as soon as they've shaken hands she's tilting her chin up and studying the ceiling's painted design, one hand resting in her pocket as the other tucks loose strands of hair behind her ear. Her pale blouse and fitted jeans and startlingly red lipstick seem faded, colorless, against the fierce symmetry of her face. In this house of God, she is an avenging angel.

The job, simple as it is, is a complete disaster because he can't take his eyes off her long enough to concentrate. The wallpaper of the apartment he's meant to be creating is replaced with paint, the windows face the wrong way and the grandfather clock won't tick. She rolls her eyes in his direction just before everything goes to hell, and somehow manages to salvage the scraps of the situation.

…

_You are forever in my heart_

_You never died_

…

In the workplace, she is methodical, calm. Every risk is calculated, every decision preceded by lists of pros and cons, every action swift and ruthlessly efficient. She dabbles in architecture, and there is a sense of meaning to everything she creates, a quiet elegance, a gravity in the cracks in the pavement and boxes of flowers in the windowsills. She creates a subtle kind of beauty. Something permanent. Something to inspire a strange twinge in the heartstrings of the dreamer. It's an unexpected talent in someone so wickedly capable with grenade launchers and machine guns.

In the real world, he has never met anyone so wild and so free. She flirts shamelessly with every man who crosses her path, bullies her team members and employers into doing everything her way, lets cigarette smoke seep into each room she enters, and is a positive terror in the kitchen, making recipes up as she goes along and forgetting to turn off the oven.

He has never met anyone with so much love to give.

She laughs and charms her way into the cardboard box of his life, and soon he finds she's opened all the windows and turned on old French music and hung up tasteful paintings on the walls of his apartment. He's always cold at night because she hogs the covers and he really needs to say something about her inedible culinary experiments, but not for a moment does he regret her shouldering open his door and dropping a bag of groceries onto the kitchen table and tossing her coat over a chair with a perfectly confident _well you aren't going to make the next move so I will_,because she is a whirlwind and he has never felt so properly alive.

…

_I know you're dreaming_

_I know you're at peace_

…

"Try something new," she urges him, in the early stages of their independent research. "Not a city. I can't stand the sight of another cathedral or skyscraper or courthouse. I want something different."

So he builds a beach while she watches, matching the texture of the powdery sands to her skin and making the waves the same color as her eyes. She laughs in pure delight, throwing her head back to the unbroken expanse of sky, and for the very first time he thinks he wouldn't care if he had to give up the wonders of playing God and spend the rest of his life in the real world, because she's better than any dream he's ever dreamed, and together they're more magnificent than any he ever will.

For propriety's sake he waits another year before taking them back to their beach and pulling out the delicate silver ring he's chosen after hours hunched over sketches and multiple prolonged visits to various jewelry shops.

"For heaven's sake, Dom, not in a _dream_," she says at once. And then: "Yes. Of course. Yes."

They are jerked unpleasantly out of each other's arms by the kick.

…

_Whenever you call me_

_I'll go under_

…

But it's the beginning of the end—the first time he goes too deep. And she, for all her force and all her care—she always follows.

…

_The curtain calls_

_The cast recedes_

…

She is the one who brings up the concept of the dream within a dream. They spend months refining it, dedicating countless shots of caffeine and ugly arguments and sleepless nights to being pioneers of a world where everything lies at their fingertips. It is seductive, and terrifying, and splendid.

But at first, it's easy to come home. They go out for dinner after their first real success, and they're told they'll have to wait a half-hour for a table because he forgot to make reservations in the thrill of the moment. She gives the maître d' a seductive smile, widening those extraordinary eyes, and devotes to him a few minutes of her attention, her husband glaring at the poor idiot from the background, until the man secures a table for them with a perfect view of the stars.

"Next time, we need to try entirely glass walls. I don't like the steel framework," she tells him over dessert. "And then we'll play with the sunset—think of it, a sky in silver and purple…green and gold…anything at all…and then go up a level and match the wallpaper to the color scheme…

"Design the thing yourself if you're going to be so particular."

She plucks a berry from her slice of fruitcake and flicks it at him. The elderly couple a table over glares at her, and she smothers her laugh in her hands.

It's enough. Until it's not. Until he finds her curled up naked on the floor of the bathroom, a lifetime later, hugging her knees to her chest and whispering that she misses her children when they're asleep upstairs.

…

_All that ever was_

_All that ever will be_

…

She descends into morbidity, fingers kitchen knives far too long before calmly chopping vegetables, lights a fire every evening in the fireplace, even in the midst of summer, because she has developed a fascination for the act of staring into the flames.

She thinks, therefore she is.

She thinks that her world is not real and therefore she is no longer real. So he does nothing except watch her pad barefoot through the house, missing the sound of her stilettos on the tile. She stares at her children with vacant eyes and he marvels with an odd kind of detachment at the physical pain in his chest that a broken heart brings.

…

_I still wonder where you are_

_I know you're dreaming_

…

_I miss you more than I can bear…_

Her tears pool into the hollow between her nose and the corner of her eye, cling to her lashes, soak his shirt.

…_but I have to let you go..._

She rises from his arms, her smile an enigma. She is the one to leave him, to walk out into the raging winds, always in control. In that moment, she is as she once was, brilliant and forward and full of light, and he in longing to be young and idealistic and hers again he wants nothing more than to follow her.

This doesn't feel like letting go. This feels like falling in love again, and regretting and hating and hurting again.

But Mal, the real Mal, would approve. She wanted the real world for him. She always did.

…

_In whither and repose_

_This frayed chapter_

…

During the funeral, he holds James close to his chest and keeps his hand threaded through Philippa's. The girl's black dress brings out the too-familiar blue of her eyes. She cries softly, too young to grasp the magnitude of her own brokenness, but too wise already not to see herself mired in tragedy.

He lets Miles lead the two of them away afterwards, and stands quietly at her graveside. He hears police sirens—of course, he was foolish to come back—but he can't quite bring himself to care. Soon enough he'll leave, with no luggage but the agony of this last visit.

There's no gravestone yet, of course, but there is a plaque marked with her name and the standard words _Beloved Daughter and Mother. _Frightened by their inadequacy, he tries to call her back to mind as she really was, kissing her father's cheek, singing softly to her son. Laughing, with him, at him.

_You were my new dream. _

She was too beautiful for his world.

...

_Fade into neon black_

…


End file.
